First of all I have no doubt that I’d be singing like a bird once the drowning sensation hit. But I don’t know anything, and anything is what my interrogators would get from me.

From elder DeMott’s piece, “Because it is continuously engaged in scotching all attempts to distinguish better from worse leadership responses, the Commission can’t discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits of mind and temperament essential in those chosen to discharge command responsibility during crises. It can’t tell the truth about what was done and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial turning points.”

This quote from your fathers critique of the 911 Commission declares above the very failings of both the commission, and the writers critique. For your dad the commission did not damn enough, it was not convened for that purpose. For you I infer that the commission appears to not have split enough hairs, or split too many unfavorably, again it was not convened for that use.

Please note that the Commission was not set up to be a barber shop or gossip house. Bipartisan entities place limits on people and should by definition limit our expectations of them. (Only thirty more some years till the Warren Commissions findings were scheduled to be released), and even Castro by then may be dead).

Torture as defined by the UN conventions on torture was adopted by the General Assembly in December of 1975. The US is not a signatory to that definition. The one we are a signatory to is much more stringent in its definition of torture which water boarding again falls under as torture due to the lasting psychological impact. Because the folks at Gitmo are not civilians and are not legal combatants, I could care less what happens to them. I figure the modern equivalent of a keel hauling is more than adequate, as they are pirates at best. But I do believe that the information we require is better solicited in other ways. And with only one exception that I am aware of, the time urgency senario does not apply to the conditions of torture outlined in the memos.

I am still frosted by what occurred in AG. Not just because of the recklessness of the garbage going on. But also because it was not even close to being effective in obtaining information about the enemy. Placing our troops in such a quandary was not a legitimate use of US assets. Placing a fictitious seal of approval in the “sounds like an order and sounds like it got approval from the AG, and and the JAG, does not excuse any of the persons at AG for misconduct and what is in my opinion a gross dereliction of duty. I quite honestly do not care a whit about the gits in Cuba, I do care about the lives of our soldiers in harms way, and the effect of the actions at AG had on their ability to complete the mission. In this day of leaks, it seems obvious that if you don’t want something to get out to the public, don’t do it is rule, I still find it difficult to believe the occurrences at AG were sanctioned. The amount of suffering visited on the homes of a brave few, make hearsay and rumor not nearly enough to prosecute.

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html

Water Boarding as defined by the Member of the Doolittle raid, was only a part of the torture inflected on them by the japs. The descriptions indicate that both Boarding and ingestion were applied and are consistent with the legal letter and intent of torture because of the tendency to leave lasting emotional or psychological trauma and the danger of death from 12 to 24 hours following.

Such physical methods had no business in Iraq, and with the exception of AG for a brief did not exist there.